Steve Forde

Wrote up a news post on IndieDB for Pombie Zong; outlining some of the new features and what still needs to be done before it gets published to Google Play.

Been helping the guys across-town over at PlayNimbus with some character/concept art.

Or watch on YouTube: http://youtu.be/D1pxV_eiWLU

This past weekend I launched a new website dedicated to my game projects: www.cairn4.com – Not too much on it in terms of content at the moment, but eventually I’ll be transitioning my zombie game dev posts over there.

And speaking of my zombie game… Besides all the obvious benefits of using source control, one thing that’s really nice about using git is that I can use my commit log to see how much progress I make each week.  Over the last month, I’ve been averaging around 4 commits per day – sometimes they’re just simple bug fixes, but sometimes they are…

Not that I have ample free time on my hands… I’ve taken up the crazy task of rewriting most of my zombie paddle/pong game with a few specific reasons and goals in mind, including:

• To use libGDX’s Scene2D for almost all of the drawing on-scree with Stages and Actors.  This also makes for easy menus, buttons etc instead of attempting to porting over my 1/2 written UI setup I had back when the game was still all in XNA.
• Using libGDX’s particle emitter setup, which allows me to use the particle editor tool rather than tweaking them via code. Probably way better performance too.
• Implementing Box2D for physics/collisions.  More accurate, and the possibility of cooler effects like explosion knock-back etc.

So far I’ve gotten some of the menu flow setup, and you can essentially just play a basic game of Pong… still need to add the actual zombies back in though

Behold, some new art for the Main Menu:

Also posted to DeviantArt: http://fav.me/d4qbehv

New screenshot! Just up’d the game’s default resolution to 1280 x 720, and with that, fixed-up and updated a bunch of the game’s assets.

This little zombie pong game is coming along nicely. Yet despite being a rather simple game, there’s still tons of work to do on menus and non-gameplay related stuff. Also, all kinds of crazy ideas like an unlockables system for earning new paddles and powerups, more zombie AI behaviors, zombie bosses, a million different powerups, and the list goes on.

My zombie game now has a functioning menu system. Granted the code for it is a huge mess and really, REALLY needs to be refactored… for now, it works, and has some button art:

Right now it just uses the keyboard Up/Down arrows to cycle through the options.  I’ll probably also add mouse and controller support for it.

Finally got around to recording a short video of my zombie pong game!